Overview of Shell with Medici Coat of Arms

Giuseppe Grisoni · n.d.

Medium

Gouache, heightened with touches of gold paint, on ivory laid paper

Original size

21.2 × 15.6 cm (8 3/8 × 6 3/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

This delicate study of a shell bearing the Medici coat of arms is both a document of aristocratic taste and a quietly dazzling feat of draughtsmanship, its ivory paper ground lending the composition an almost luminous warmth. Giuseppe Grisoni trained in Florence before spending a formative period in England, where he became known as a skilled portraitist and decorative painter working among the European elite. His return to the continent brought him into the orbit of Florentine court culture, and works like this one reveal a different register of his talent — intimate, precise, and attuned to the material world of luxury objects. The combination of gouache with touches of gold paint was a specialist technique associated with the documentation of precious collections, and Grisoni deploys it here with a jeweller's patience, describing the shell's nacreous surface and the heraldic device with equal care. The Medici were avid collectors of natural curiosities and engraved shells, and this work likely served as a record of just such a piece in a Florentine cabinet of wonders. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates this intimate work into a richer, more tactile medium without losing the precise attention to surface and light that makes the original so quietly compelling.